Remarks at the Roosevelt Home Club Celebration, Hyde Park,
N.Y.
July 11, 1936

Friends and
neighbors:

Verily, my
holiday has begun. It has begun with this nice homecoming meeting here in
Hyde Park and with another nice family party which is to take place at five
o'clock.

I can look
forward now to two or three weeks of freedom from official cares except,
possibly, for the reading and acting on some forty or fifty dispatches a
day, the signing of a bag full of mail once every four or five days unless,
of course, I get caught in a fog down the coast of Maine, and I am rather
praying for fog.

I have been
hearing some wonderful things this afternoon. You know, I have been hearing
Judge Mack on the air. I have heard his speeches in conventions and I have
always wondered what he looked like when he was making a speech. Now I
know.

And I have
also discovered something else. When Mrs. Moses Smith gave the flowers to
my wife, somebody said, "Speech, speech," and my wife said,
"I never make a speech."

Live and
learn!

But I suppose
that today, up to the time my holiday began at three o'clock, was a fairly
typical one of my life in the last three or three and a half years. I
started of[ this morning when I got of[ the train in New York, and the
first person I conferred with was the Mayor of the City of New York. We
talked about new projects, useful projects on which to put unemployed
people to work, such as new schoolhouses and bridges, waterworks, and so
forth. And then I talked with the Governor of the State of New York in
regard to floods, for a large portion of our State, as you know -- the
Southern Tier--has been visited twice in the last two years with very
serious floods on a number of rivers. After that I conferred with the
Administrator of Relief, Harry Hopkins, and his assistant in New York, in
regard to the very serious situation that has occurred for the second time
in the Northwest. I can only give you a picture of it by telling you that
two hundred and seventy-five counties are seriously affected by this
drought. We have in this State, as you know, sixty-two counties, and out
there the average size of a county is about twice the size of one of our
counties. So you can get an idea of the land area that is affected.

There are some
two hundred and four thousand families, as I remember it--and that is a lot
of families--and there are a great many more people when you come down to
the individuals, probably over a million, possibly a million and a half,
who probably have no idea, no clear idea, as to what the future holds in
store for them.

They are brave
people, just as the people of this whole country have been brave during the
serious days of the depression. They have kept up their heads, and they
have kept up their hopes, and they have a right to expect that they will
have every reasonable help not only in remaining alive, but in having some
future, some worth-while future, made possible for them.

And so all the
agencies, not only of the Federal Government but of the State Governments
and the local county Governments, are joining in the great task of
relieving the burdens and solving the problems which the drought has
brought upon them. Their crops are burning up; their cattle have nothing to
eat; and they themselves have very little to eat or drink, because most of
their wells have dried up.

The next thing
I had to do today was the opening of the Triborough Bridge. We are very apt
to think in terms of the spectacular and the obvious--things like the
Triborough Bridge which costs sixty million dollars, which unites three
great boroughs, each with a population of more than a million souls. That
is the spectacular side of what we have been doing. Of course, that bridge
put a great many people to work who needed work, not only on the bridge
itself, but back in the factories and in the forests and in the mines. I
suppose, first and last, there were fifteen or twenty thousand people who
were engaged at work in constructing that bridge, either at the site or
away from the site.

We are apt to
think of the help that each of our three forms of government, local, State
and Federal, has given--we are apt to think of all that just in terms of
this enormous structure. Yet, if we analyze it, we find that the help
depends very much on the size of the community.

I shall give
you an example: A little while ago I received in Washington a letter from a
small town in the Middle West. There were four hundred voters in the town.
The letter was signed by three hundred and ninety of them. I do not know
what party the other ten belonged to. But the three hundred and ninety
signatures expressed the idea to me that the finest thing that has happened
to their town was the building of a new schoolhouse. To them that
schoolhouse had been the great need of that town, and it was the one thing
that they and their wives and children wanted. They had not been able to
raise the money to build it out there. Nobody would take their bond; no
bank would lend it to them except, perhaps, at a very high rate of
interest. It was an honest, God-fearing community. They believed that over
a period of ten or twelve or fifteen years they could pay back the loan, if
they could get it on reasonable terms. The result was that the Federal
Government made them the loan, and gave them a portion of the cost of the
building in what we call "work relief." The building was built
and the town feels just as proud of that little schoolhouse as the seven
million people who live in New York City feel about their Triborough
Bridge.

All over the
country, in the thirty-one hundred counties, some useful work has been
done. Speaking of schools, there have been built in the last three years
over thirty thousand new schools in the United States. They have been built
with Federal aid. There are more than a million desks- additional
desks--for pupils. In other words, we can educate a million more children
than we could three years ago.

We have built,
I cannot tell you off-hand how many, but we have built not hundreds, but
thousands of bridges. We have built I do not know how many thousands of
miles, not only of fine hard concrete roads, but also of farm-to-market
roads that have been needed so much in every State.
It is an interesting thing to me that the usefulness of all of these
thousands and tens of thousands of projects has depended, in large part, on
the interest of the individual community. Of course, as you know, the
origin of these projects is, in almost every case, in the community. The
community knows that it has a certain number of people to take care of; and
they have been told that those people should, if possible, be given useful
work. Therefore, it has been the community itself which has suggested what
that work should be.

Where the
community takes the greatest interest the work itself is the most valuable,
the most permanent, and the most satisfactory. On the other side of the
picture, in those communities where there is very little interest in the
needs of the community, we have the occasional projects that do not seem to
anybody to be especially useful from a permanent point of view. So, the
ultimate responsibility comes back to just where it was in the days of the
New England town meetings in the year 1650, in other words, to local
interest in government and local understanding of government problems.

We have very
little to fear in this country, if we can increase in the next few years
understanding of, and interest in, government such as we have seen in this
country in the past three years. That has been the greatest contribution of
the four years of the depression followed by the three years of the
revival.

And so, as Mr.
Wilson has so well put it in the prayer, I cannot help feeling that the
undertaking heart goes with equal strength and equal importance with the
understanding of the problem itself. I think we have increased the
functioning of our understanding heart in this country. There are more and
more people who are looking at the social needs of our land. There are more
and more people who are coming to realize that in many other Nations they
have already gone farther toward meeting social needs than we have, and
that we have to go a good long way to catch up with them, to bring
ourselves up to the modern conception or ideal of personal security for the
men, women and children who make up the great mass of our population.

That has been
our ideal during these years; and I believe that it is going to be the
ideal of the country during the next few years. I believe that the country
is going to insist on the maintenance of that ideal and insist on action
looking toward its accomplishment.